President Obama's message in the State of the Union address confirmed
that he is tone-deaf to the grievous threats that exist to American national
security and incapable of changing course before those dangers become a
terrible reality.

The catastrophe of nuclear proliferation had finally made it to the top of
the agenda by the time he took office. But over the past year, this president
added disarmament to the same platform. He put the retention of U.S. nuclear
weaponry on the U.N. negotiating table alongside Iranian acquisition of such
arms. In this State of the Union address he wasn't shy about reasserting
this world view: "We are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to
the American people — the threat of nuclear weapons." By which he
meant, in American hands too. The president did not first and foremost promise
never to let the genocidal Iranian regime acquire these weapons of mass
destruction. Instead, the first national-security priority he articulated was
to seek "to reduce our stockpiles and launchers."

According to President Obama, only by weakening America can we hope to
convince our enemies to stand down.

The president alleged that it was "these diplomatic efforts" at
disarmament that "have . . . strengthened our hand in dealing with those
nations that [are] . . . in pursuit of these weapons." He knows Iran is
closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons. He is fully aware that the U.N.
Security Council is deadlocked on adopting new sanctions against Iran. He is
cognizant that China has repudiated the suggestion of a unified front to stop
Iranian ambitions. And yet he told the American people — with a straight
face — that his diplomatic effort at disarmament "is why the
international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is
more isolated."

President Obama announced that in April he will hold another hand-shaking,
hot-air-generating "nuclear security summit" — to control
American and Russian arms. As for dealing with Iran, he could not manage to
muster a single concrete move, just an empty "they too will face growing
consequences."

The president then touted the only leg on which his foreign policy has been
standing: "engagement." To Iran's brutalized dissidents,
engagement has meant crocodile tears. The State of the Union added yet another
layer of verbiage over their gravestones. "We support the human rights of
the women marching through the streets of Iran," claimed the president.
Why the limitation? What about the children, the men, the myriad minorities?
Why did the president delicately avoid naming any Iranian victim, including the
Americans now being held hostage in Iran?

This is an administration that has turned its back on inconvenient victims
from Tehran to Tibet to Israel. An administration that has climbed on board the
U.N. Human Rights Council, despite its being a tool of Islamic states for
defeating rights. And yet the president disingenuously lectured: "America
must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity."

The president concluded his perfunctory remarks on national security by
analogizing the need for strength in an increasingly dangerous world to a
childish game: "Let's put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is
tough." In so doing, he has underestimated the intelligence of his
audience. Americans increasingly understand that the weakness exuded by
President Obama over this past year, and venerated in this State of the Union
address, has reinvigorated real enemies, not imaginary ones.